Summary

Here's a summary of where things stand:

• Edward Snowden, 29, an employee of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, revealed himself to be the whistleblower behind the exposure of secret NSA surveillance programs. Snowden said he acted out of a desire to protect "privacy and basic liberties."

• Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill have interviewed Snowden in Hong Kong, where he traveled from his home in Hawaii in late May. "The only thing I fear is the harmful effects on my family, who I won't be able to help any more," he said.

• In Washington, the chairs of congressional intelligence committees said they thought Snowden's disclosures are criminal and they expect him to be prosecuted if possible.

• Senator Rand Paul said he would try to challenge the NSA surveillance programs in court and Senator Mark Udall called for 'reopening' the Patriot Act to remove the legal foundation for broad surveillance sweeps.

5.24pm ET

Booz Allen Hamilton, Edward Snowden's employer, has released a statement saying that Snowden "has been an employee of our firm for less than 3 months" and calling news reports "shocking":

June 9, 2013

Booz Allen can confirm that Edward Snowden, 29, has been an employee of our firm for less than 3 months, assigned to a team in Hawaii. News reports that this individual has claimed to have leaked classified information are shocking, and if accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm. We will work closely with our clients and authorities in their investigation of this matter.

Edward Snowden has been charged with no crime ... but there is already a White House petition to pardon him. The petition, which has only 70 signatures so far, declares:

Edward Snowden is a national hero and should be immediately issued a a full, free, and absolute pardon for any crimes he has committed or may have committed related to blowing the whistle on secret NSA surveillance programs.

White House petitions, hosted on the official government web site, are billed as a way of injecting "your voice in government." Petitions that get 100,000 signatures are meant to earn a reply from the White House.

Earlier Hague dismissed a Guardian report that the British monitoring service GCHQ had access to the NSA Prism network, calling the notion "fanciful" and "nonsense."

Hague has announced he would make a statement to parliament on Monday after the Guardian revealed that UK intelligence agencies used the US Prism system to generate intelligence reports.

5.05pm ET

Booz Allen Hamilton, Edward Snowden's employer, is one of America's biggest security contractors and "a significant part of the constantly revolving door between the US intelligence establishment and the private sector," Guardian diplomatic editor Julian Borger writes:

The current of director of national intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, who issued a stinging attack on the intelligence leaks this weekend, is a former Booz Allen executive. The firm's current vice-chairman, Mike McConnell, was DNI under the George W Bush administration. He worked for the Virginia-based company before taking the job, and returned to the firm after leaving it. The company website says McConnell is responsible for its "rapidly expanding cyber business".

James Woolsey, a former CIA director was also a Booz Allen vice-president, and Melissa Hathaway, another former company executive also once worked as the top aide on cybersecurity to McConnell when he was DNI. The company headquarters in the leafy Washington suburb of McLean in northern Virginia, close to CIA headquarters and home to former and current intelligence officers.

Snowden's decision to reveal his identity as a computer systems administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton, directly handling National Security Agency IT systems, raises significant image problems for the $6bn company and its 25,000-strong staff, which has traded on a bond of trust with sensitive clients, particularly the intelligence establishment.

Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet rights group, tweets about Daniel Ellsberg, who as a 40-year-old defense researcher gave the documents to the New York Times that became known as the Pentagon Papers.

I was just with Dan Ellsberg as he learned out about Edward Snowden. He called Snowden a hero, said he's been waiting for him for 40 years.

Presenting our slide show of NSA surveillance as told through classic children's books:

As news of the NSA's secret surveillance programs spread this weekend, Twitter did what it does best: mockery. User Darth asked followers to contribute titles for #NSAKidsBooks, which were then turned into beautifully hilarious works of art. Darth has kindly allowed us to share them.

Whistleblower reveals identity

The Guardian has just published a story,video and Q&A in which the whistleblower behind the exposure of the NSA surveillance programs, defence contractor employee Edward Snowden, reveals his identity.

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," he said.

Snowden will go down in history as one of America's most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world's most secretive organisations – the NSA.

In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions," but "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."

Despite his determination to be publicly unveiled, he repeatedly insisted that he wants to avoid the media spotlight. "I don't want public attention because I don't want the story to be about me. I want it to be about what the US government is doing."

• "White House 'welcomes media interest' in Prism," by Dan Roberts in the Guardian. "We welcome congressional interest in these issues, we welcome the interest of the American people and of course the media in these issues," says deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes.

• "Peeping Barry," Maureen Dowd's column in the New York Times. "Now that we are envisioning some guy in a National Security Agency warehouse in Fort Meade, Md., going through billions of cat videos and drunk-dialing records of teenagers, can the Ministries of Love and Truth be far behind?"

A climate of controversy over leak investigations does not mean that the government is not about to launch a large leak investigation, Politico quotes sources in law enforcement, legal defense and watchdog work as saying.

“You can sort of hear the polygraph machines warming up,” quipped Steven Aftergood, who’s been tracking leak probes for two decades for the Federation of American Scientists.

The former director of the US National Security Agency has indicated that surveillanceprograms have "expanded" under Barack Obama's time in office and said the spy agency has more powers now than when he was in command.

The Guardian's Paul Lewis, Spencer Ackerman and Nicholas Watt have a story just out:

Michael Hayden, who served most of his tenure as NSA director under George W Bush, said there was "incredible continuity" between the two presidents.

Hayden's comments came as the debate around the extent of government surveillance in the US and the UK intensified on Sunday. In Washington, some US senators demanded more transparency from the Obama administration. Libertarian Republican Rand Paul said he wanted to mount a supreme court challenge.

The British foreign secretary, William Hague, announced he would make a statement to parliament on Monday after the Guardian revealed that UK intelligence agencies used the US Prism system to generate intelligence reports.

Hague said it was "fanciful" and "nonsense" to suggest that the British monitoring service, GCHQ, would work with an agency in another country to circumvent restrictions on surveillance in the UK.

Former NSA officer and professor John Schindler's Twitter feed is a rich source of caution that what the world has found out in the last five days about NSA surveillance is ripe for misinterpretation.

SIGINT refers to signal intelligence, intelligence gleaned from the interception of signals. One "Old Way" for agents to find out what SIGINT coverage was available for a particular region, a classified document published yesterday by the Guardian notes, was to "ask a 30-year SIGINTer."

The "New Way" is to "use Big Data technology to query SIGINT collection in the cloud" through the Boundless Informant database, according to the document.

At risk of sending same tweet *again*: SIGINT is hard, folks, esp in 21st century. If u have never been in biz it's VERY hard to grasp fast

Schindler advises that even experts of historical SIGINT may be little qualified to assess current activity because "huge changes in telecommunications in the last decade-plus have thrown up a very different intelligence playing field."

Simply put, everything is out there in the online world, in the ‘trons somewhere, just waiting to be picked up and exploited. And you don’t have to be a hardcore civil libertarian, as I am not, to be a tad concerned about the implications of all this. In the borderless online world, what exactly are the boundaries? It was all a lot clearer back in 1993 when U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive 18, USSID 18 to the cognoscenti, was promulgated. But that was a long, long time ago in telecom. Now it’s … murky.

12.34pm ET

In a Guardian editorial today Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, one of the authors of the original USA PATRIOT Act, calls the newly exposed NSA program to harvest Americans' phone records an "abuse" of the law. (It is known that the legal basis for the surveillance programs is the Patriot Act, but the legal interpretations in question are secret.)

"The administration claims authority to sift through details of our private lives because the Patriot Act says that it can," Sensenbrenner writes. "I disagree. I authored the Patriot Act, and this is an abuse of that law":

The legislation had to be narrowly tailored – everyone agreed that we could not allow unrestrained surveillance. The Patriot Act had 17 provisions. To prevent abuse, I insisted on sunsetting all the provisions so that they would automatically expire if Congress did not renew them. This would allow Congress to conduct oversight of the administration's implementation of the act. [...]

Technically, the [Obama] administration's actions were lawful insofar as they were done pursuant to an order from the Fisa court. But based on the scope of the released order, both the administration and the Fisa court are relying on an unbounded interpretation of the act that Congress never intended.

The released Fisa order requires daily productions of the details of every call that every American makes, as well as calls made by foreigners to or from the United States. Congress intended to allow the intelligence communities to access targeted information for specific investigations. How can every call that every American makes or receives be relevant to a specific investigation?

The National Security Agency can secretly access real-time user data provided by as many as 50 US companies, The Week's Mark Ambinder reports. The report, based on the account of two anonymous government officials, say the companies range "from credit rating agencies to internet service providers:

Several of the companies have provided records continuously since 2006, while others have given the agency sporadic access, these officials said. These officials disclosed the number of participating companies in order to provide context for a series of disclosures about the NSA's domestic collection policies. The officials, contacted independently, repeatedly said that "domestic collection" does not mean that the target is based in the U.S. or is a U.S. citizen; rather, it refers only to the origin of the data.

12.13pm ET

What can Prism do?

An NSA slide describes Prism activity as "collection directly from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple."

But a "fact sheet" released by DNI James Clapper Saturday purported to rebut that description. The sheet said Prism is "an internal government computer system."

"The United States Government does not unilaterally obtain information from the servers of U.S. electronic communication service providers," the sheet said.

The sheet says "unilaterally"; that would seem to allow for the government and Internet companies working together, bilaterally. But the Internet companies have issued strongly worded denials that they are part of any program giving the government "direct access" to their servers.

The Washington Post on Saturday published further reportage on Prism in which anonymous intelligence sources discuss the meaning of the "directly from the servers" language in the NSA slide:

Intelligence community sources said that this description, although inaccurate from a technical perspective, matches the experience of analysts at the NSA. From their workstations anywhere in the world, government employees cleared for PRISM access may “task” the system and receive results from an Internet company without further interaction with the company’s staff.

In a Guardian editorial Thursday, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, called the NSA surveillance programs "an all-out assault on the constitution."

This morning Paul said on Fox News Sunday that he may try to mount a Supreme Court challenge to the programs, calling them an "extraordinary invasion of privacy":

"I'm going to be seeing if I can challenge this at the Supreme Court level," Paul said. "I’m going to be asking all the internet providers and all of the phone companies: Ask your customers to join me in a class action lawsuit. If we get 10 million Americans saying we don’t want our phone records looked at, then maybe someone will wake up and something will change in Washington."

The White House has said that it welcomes media interest in US surveillance practices, despite a request for a criminal investigation into leaks that exposed secret NSA surveillance programs, Guardian Washington bureau chief Dan Roberts reports:

Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said: "The debate that's been sparked by these revelations – while we do not think that the revelation of secret programmes is in the national security interest of the US – the broader debate about privacy and civil liberties [is something Obama] went out of his way to identify as one of the trade-offs we have to wrestle with.

"We'll have that debate. We welcome congressional interest in these issues, we welcome the interest of the American people and of course the media in these issues but we feel confident we have done what we need to do strike a balance between privacy and security by building in rigorous oversight mechanisms."

11.16am ET

Glenn Greenwald has had multiple opportunities this morning to mount on national TV a defense of First Amendment rights. ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked him whether he had been contacted by the FBI or any law enforcement official.

Glenn replied that "any time they would like to speak to me, I would be more than happy to speak to them":

No. And any time they would like to speak to me, I would be more than happy to speak to them, and I will tell them that there is this thing called the Constitution, and the very first amendment of which guarantees a free press. As an American citizen, I have every right and even the obligation as a journalist to tell my fellow citizens and our readers what it is that the government is doing, that they don’t want people in the United States to know about, and I’m happy to talk to them at any time, and the attempt to intimidate journalists and sources with these constant threats of investigation aren’t going to work.

11.12am ET

CNN's Kurtz ask Greenwald if the prospect of a criminal investigation worries him.

"I'm not worried at all," Glenn replies. "I read the First Amendment that I have the right to a free press. I think it's my duty as an American."

To the extent that we have politicians like Mike Rogers running around boasting that only they know what the government is doing... that to me is exactly the reason why transparency is so vital here.

Kurtz asks Greenwald whether exposure of the NSA programs isn't dangerous because terrorists now will realize that the US government is listening to them.

"Every terrorist on the planet already knows" that, Greenwald replies. "Every terrorist who doesn't know that is a terrorist who is incapable of tying their shoes, much less detonating a bomb in the United States."

11.04am ET

In her Sunday column, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times doubts the ability of Congress to rein in the NSA:

Don’t count on Congress to fix the assault on privacy. In a rare bit of bipartisanship, driven by a craven fear of being seen as soft on terrorists, both parties have lined up behind the indiscriminate surveillance sweeps, except for a few outliers on either end of the spectrum.[...]

The president insists that his trellis of surveillance programs is “under very strict supervision by all three branches of government.” That is not particularly comforting given that the federal government so rarely does anything properly.

Dowd remembers that in 2007, candidate Obama said he would not run a "Bush-Cheney lite" administration. "He doesn't have to worry," she writes:

With prisoners denied due process at Gitmo starving themselves, with the C.I.A. not always aware who it’s killing with drones, with an overzealous approach to leaks, and with the government’s secret domestic spy business swelling, there’s nothing lite about it.

10.54am ET

Stephanopoulos asked Greenwald for his reponse to the assertion by director of national intelligence James Clapper that the NSA disclosures are reckless and the news stories are inaccurate. "The American people have a right to know," Glenn replied:

GREENWALD: Every single time any major media outlet reports on something that the government is hiding, that political officials don’t want people to know, such as the fact that they are collecting the phone records of all Americans, regardless of any suspicion of wrongdoing, the people in power do exactly the same thing. They attack the media as the messenger and they are trying to discredit the story. This has been going back decades, ever since the Pentagon papers were released by the New York Times, and political officials said you are endangering national security. The only thing we’ve endangered is the reputation of the people in power who are building this massive spying apparatus about any accountability who are trying to hide from the American people what it is that they are doing. There is no national security harm from letting people know that they are collecting all phone records, that they are tapping into the Internet, that they are planning massive cyber attacks both foreign and even domestic. These are things that the American people have a right to know. The only thing that’s being damaged is the credibility of political officials in the way that they exercise power in the dark.

10.51am ET

In his interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Glenn Greenwald said documents from the Boundless Informant program show the NSA keeps precise statistics on the intelligence it collects, despite its claims before Congress that it is unable to keep count:

STEPHANOPOULOS: In March 2013, you report the government collected 97 billion pieces of data, almost all of it from outside the U.S. What’s the key finding here?

GREENWALD: There are two key findings. One is that there are members of the Congress who have responsibility for oversight, for checking the people who run this vast secret apparatus of spying to make sure they are not abusing their power. These people in Congress have continuously asked for the NSA to provide basic information about how many Americans they are spying on, how many conversations and telephone and chats of Americans they are intercepting, and the NSA continuously tells them we don’t have the capability to tell you that, to even give you a rough estimate. So with these documents that we published show, that were marked top secret to prevent the American people from learning about them, was that the NSA keeps extremely precise statistics, all the data that the senators announced where the NSA has falsely claimed does not exist.

And the other thing that it does, as you said, is it indicates just how vast and massive the NSA is in terms of sweeping up all forms of communication around the globe, including domestically.

10.26am ET

Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence committee, says the person or person who leaked information about the NSA surveillance programs should be charged with a crime.

"I absolutely think they should be prosecuted," Rogers told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. Then he said of the Glenn Greenwald:

"He doesn't have a clue how this thing works. Neither did the person who released just enough information to be dangerous."

Stephanopoulos asks Senator Feinstein if she thinks the whistleblower should be prosecuted.

"No sir," replied Clapper. "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly."

Stephanopoulos tells Feinstein, I have to admit it's hard for me to square what Clapper said there with what we've found out in recent days.

Feinstein responds that James Clapper is a model of honesty and says perhaps the question –or the answer– has been misunderstood.

Updated at 10.41am ET

10.19am ET

Senate intelligence committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein is on Stephanopoulos' show to talk about the surveillance programs. Defending the programs, she said she flew over the World Trade Center on the way to the funeral in Manhattan of Senator Frank Lautenberg. Feinstein says:

"I thought of those bodies jumping out of the building, hitting the canopy."

Diane Feinstein is one sick puppy using the image of people jumping out of the WTC to justify unquestioned acceptance of govt surveillane

Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald has appeared this morning on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. We'll post sections of Glenn's remarks shortly. The interview concluded:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, should we be expecting more revelations from you?

GREENWALD: You should.

10.06am ET

The National Security Agency requested a criminal probe on Saturday into the leak that exposed its secret surveillance programs, a spokesman for director of national intelligence James Clapper told Reuters:

It was not known how broad a leaks investigation was requested by the super-secret NSA, but Shawn Turner, a spokesman for Clapper's office, said a "crimes report has been filed."

The report goes to the Justice Department, which has established procedures for determining whether an investigation is warranted. Prosecutors do not accept all requests, but they have brought a series of high-profile leak investigations under President Barack Obama. U.S. officials said the NSA leaks were so astonishing they expected the Justice Department to take the case.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

9.57am ET

Michael Hayden, a former director of both the NSA and CIA, told Fox News Sunday that President Obama has "expanded" the volume of surveillance programs, the Guardian's Paul Lewis writes:

"We’ve had two very different presidents pretty much doing the same thing with regard to electronic surveillance," Hayden said, asserting that there had been "incredible continuity." "That seems to me to suggest that these things do work.”

Asked by anchor Chris Wallace what Obama has done with surveillance programs inherited from the Bush administration, Hayden replied:

“In terms of surveillance? Expanded [the programs] in volume, changed the legal grounding for them a little bit - put it more under congressional authorisation rather than the president’s Article 2 powers - and added a bit more oversight. But in terms of what NSA is doing, there is incredible continuity between the two presidents.

"We’ve gotten more of these records over time. With the amendment to the FISA Act, in 2008, which Senator Obama finally voted for, NSA is actually empowered to do more things than I was empowered to do under President Bush’s special authorisation.”

Updated at 10.32am ET

9.52am ET

Senator Mark Udall has called for "reopening" the Patriot Act, while Sen. John McCain conceded that there may have been some "overreach" in government surveillance programs.

One of the major Senate critics of US government surveillance called for amending the Patriot Act on Sunday to rein in the National Security Agency's broad dragnet sweeping up Americans' communications.

The NSA cited a section of the Patriot Act to justify its order to Verizon for handing over the phone records of millions of Americans, first disclosed by the Guardian. "The fact that every call I make to my friends of family is noted, the length, the date, that concerns me," Udall said.

Udall called for fuller disclosure by the Obama administration, especially about what he called the "secret law" represented by undisclosed government interpretations of surveillance law. He said it was "unclear" to him that the surveillance programs had disrupted terrorist plots, as the administration has claimed.

"The ultimate check, the ultimate balance is the American public understanding to what extent their calls are being collected, if only in the sense of metadata," Udall said.

"Let's not have this law interpreted secretly, as it has been for the last number of years." Sen. Mark Udall

"If this was September 12, 2001, we might not be having the argument we are having today," McCain told CNN, conceding, "Yes, perhaps there’s been some overreach."

While defending the surveillance programs, McCain suggested that the controversy over it justified informing every member of Congress about NSA operations in the United States, not just the members of the intelligence community. But McCain called on Congress to take responsibility for what it voted for, despite Udall's argument that the government's classified interpretations of the Patriot Act and other surveillance laws represent secret re-definitions beyond what Congress intended.

"If they don’t know what they were voting on, I think that’s more their responsibility than it is the government's," McCain said.

Updated at 9.53am ET

9.18am ET

Hello and welcome to our live blog coverage of reaction to the exposure of secret surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency. Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian, who broke the story, is scheduled to appear this morning on ABC News to talk about the story along with the Senate intelligence committee chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, and one of the Senate's longtime advocates of greater transparency on surveillance issues, Mark Udall of Colorado. We also expect to hear this morning from senators John McCain, Rand Paul and others.

Documents obtained by Guardian show the NSA conducts dragnet collection and storage of Americans' phone records; exploits data from the world's largest Internet companies with their apparent co-operation; and cases potential targets overseas for pre-emptive cyber-attacks. Further documents show the agency, using a system called Boundless Informant, counts and geographically locates the data it collects globally.

The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, on Saturday decried the release of the information and said media reports about it have been inaccurate. He said the Prism program with Internet companies is not unilateral and is conducted with congressional oversight and within the bounds of the law. The nature of the law, the secrecy under which it is interpreted and strength of oversight, meanwhile, are under debate; senior senator Dick Durbin said Friday that “you can count on two hands the number of people in Congress who really know".